Thursday, February 12, 2009

This busy day started with an 8:00 a.m. Breakfast with Senator John Kerry. (Just an aside- I now love John Kerry after seeing him in person on the Senate floor ramble on for approximately 40 minutes about melting ice glaciers. My favorite part was when he said out loud "I'm just stalling for time here." HIL-AR-IOUS! Come on' whoever watched Hillary's confirmation vote on C-SPAN knows what I'm talking about... )

Then at 10:45 a.m. Weekly meeting with President Obama and Vice President Biden. Possibly open to the press... so look out for some recaps on the news today!

At 1:00 p.m. there is a bilateral with His Excellency Ahmed Ali Aboul Gheit, Minister of Foreign Affairs of the Arab Republic of Egypt. No Q&A, just photos.

2:30 p.m. Meeting with Martin Luther King, III and others before their India trip, as mentioned in the last post. Hillary's remarks on the 50th anniversary of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s 1959 trip to India and Black History Month will begin at 2:45 p.m in the Treaty Room.

And lastly at 4:45 p.m. another bilateral with His Excellency Javier Solana, Secretary General of the Council of the European Union and High Representative for the Common Foreign and Security Policy. I googled this guy because I had no idea who he was.. he is really interesting. He was a physicist who became a political minister for 13 years. In his early life, he was anti-NATO and was on the US subversives list which was a little controversial when in 1995, Solana became the new Secretary-General of NATO. He worked with President Clinton on ending the Kosavo war... and so on and so on.

He said on Wednesday the next Israeli government must restart serious peace negotiations with the Palestinians. "I think if we continue in a crisis management mode, if we don't enter into a conflict resolution mode it will be going back and back again."

I'm so glad to see Hillary meeting with so many people. She really is doing a great job and hearing from all people. This is going to be a great day at the State Department!

2 comments:

A little over a year ago, the Obama team carried out a methodical (many believe truly despicable) campaign to smear Hillary and Bill as "racists." I'm referring here to the fact that one of Obama's female staff distributed a confidential memo to carefully selected journalists in January which alleged that an inocuous comment Hillary made about Martin Luther King ("Dr King's dream began to be realised when President Lyndon Johnson passed the Civil Rights Act of 1964") was a deliberate racial taunt. Another Obama female staffer, Candice Tolliver - whose job it was to promote Obama to African Americans - then weighed in publicly, claiming that "a cross-section of voters are alarmed at the tenor of some of these statements" and saying: "Folks are beginning to wonder: Is this an isolated situation, or is there something bigger behind all of this?" Various members of the medi and black Congressional leadership were only too happy to chime in on the "Hillary is racist" story line. That was game, set and match: the Clintons were racists, and Hillary's approval ratings among AA's plumeted from over 80% to 7% within a matter of days -- just in time for the South Carolina primary. What a coincidence!